How to explain gender differences in fear of crime:Towards an evolutionary approach

Employing data from a sample of 610 Dutch high school students and their parents, this article argues in favour of an evolutionary explanation for the fact that women are more fearful of crime than men while they are less often victimized. With respect to a variety of events that involved physical injury, varying from robbery to being involved in a car accident, female respondents were, compared to male respondents, more fearful of every event, judged every single event to be more harmful, and consistently rated their own probability to experience these events in the future as higher. The findings suggest that fear of crime among women does not represent a real higher risk of being victimized, is not primarily linked to the risk of being raped, and is not an isolated phenomenon. Indeed, women seem in general more fearful of all kinds of events that might imply a physical injury. The observed gender differences were not influenced by the degree of traditionality of the family of the respondents as expressed in status differences between the parents, in the division of household tasks, and in having an intact family. The gender differences could neither be explained by a perceived norm that boys must be more risk taking than girls. It is concluded that the observed gender differences may be the result of sexual selection that favoured risk-taking and status fights among males, and being cautious and protecting one’s offspring among females

Do We Know Whom to Trust? A Review on Trustworthiness Detection Accuracy

Judgments about people’s trustworthiness are made frequently and have important real-life consequences. However, the accuracy of these judgments is debated. We therefore systematically reviewed the current evidence for accurate trustworthiness detection in the literature. The overall evidence for accuracy is rather mixed; although we find only limited evidence for accurate trustworthiness detection from neutral photographs, trustworthiness detection becomes more accurate when the rater and target interact, when the target presentation resembles face-to-face contact, and when the target presentations contain cues or signals about the target’s trustworthiness. We also find that the current literature lacks an overarching research agenda, which leads to a large heterogeneity in the extant studies’ operationalizations. We address some of these operationalizations and suggest the following guidelines for future research: Studies should engage in stronger theory building, experimentally test moderators, strengthen generalizability by recruiting large target pools, and use appropriate methods for the analysis of nonindependent data

Investigating the Relationship Between Self-Perceived Moral Superiority and Moral Behavior Using Economic Games

Most people report that they are superior to the average person on various moral traits. The psychological causes and social consequences of this phenomenon have received considerable empirical attention. The behavioral correlates of self-perceived moral superiority, however, remain unknown. We present the results of two preregistered studies (Study 1, N=827; Study 2, N=825) in which we indirectly assessed participants’ self-perceived moral superiority, and used two incentivized economic games to measure their engagement in moral behavior. Across studies, self-perceived moral superiority was unrelated to trust in others and to trustworthiness, as measured by the Trust Game; and unrelated to fairness, as measured by the Dictator Game. This pattern of findings was robust to a range of analyses, and, in both studies, Bayesian analyses indicated moderate support for the null over the alternative hypotheses. We interpret and discuss these findings, and highlight interesting avenues for future research on this topic

Conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion

We investigate whether there is an association between conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion, two phenomena that we conjecture share common psychological characteristics despite having been studied largely separately in the previous literature. We use a public goods game to categorize subjects by type of contribution preference and we measure betrayal aversion for different categories of subject. We report three studies, using two different methods to measure betrayal aversion: a standard elicitation with monetary incentives and a novel scenario-based measure that we argue addresses concerns about the standard measure. We find strong and robust evidence of an association between conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion in the scenario-based measures but not in the standard measure

EEG Beta Oscillations in the Temporoparietal Area Related to the Accuracy in Estimating Others' Preference

Humans often attempt to predict what others prefer based on a narrow slice of experience, called thin-slicing. According to the theoretical bases for how humans can predict the preference of others, one tends to estimate the other's preference using a perceived difference between the other and self. Previous neuroimaging studies have revealed that the network of dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) is related to the ability of predicting others' preference. However, it still remains unknown about the temporal patterns of neural activities for others' preference prediction through thin-slicing. To investigate such temporal aspects of neural activities, we investigated human electroencephalography (EEG) recorded during the task of predicting the preference of others while only a facial picture of others was provided. Twenty participants (all female, average age: 21.86) participated in the study. In each trial of the task, participants were shown a picture of either a target person or self for 3 s, followed by the presentation of a movie poster over which participants predicted the target person's preference as liking or disliking. The time-frequency EEG analysis was employed to analyze temporal changes in the amplitudes of brain oscillations. Participants could predict others' preference for movies with accuracy of 56.89 ?? 3.16% and 10 out of 20 participants exhibited prediction accuracy higher than a chance level (95% interval). There was a significant difference in the power of the parietal alpha (10~13 Hz) oscillation 0.6~0.8 s after the onset of poster presentation between the cases when participants predicted others' preference and when they reported self-preference (p < 0.05). The power of brain oscillations at any frequency band and time period during the trial did not show a significant correlation with individual prediction accuracy. However, when we measured differences of the power between the trials of predicting other's preference and reporting self-preference, the right temporal beta oscillations 1.6~1.8 s after the onset of facial picture presentation exhibited a significant correlation with individual accuracy. Our results suggest that right temporoparietal beta oscillations may be correlated with one's ability to predict what others prefer with minimal information

Performance of the CMS Cathode Strip Chambers with Cosmic Rays

The Cathode Strip Chambers (CSCs) constitute the primary muon tracking device in the CMS endcaps. Their performance has been evaluated using data taken during a cosmic ray run in fall 2008. Measured noise levels are low, with the number of noisy channels well below 1%. Coordinate resolution was measured for all types of chambers, and fall in the range 47 microns to 243 microns. The efficiencies for local charged track triggers, for hit and for segments reconstruction were measured, and are above 99%. The timing resolution per layer is approximately 5 ns

Costly third-party interventions: The role of incidental anger and attention focus in punishment of the perpetrator and compensation of the victim

publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Costly third-party interventions: The role of incidental anger and attention focus in punishment of the perpetrator and compensation of the victim journaltitle: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.04.004 content_type: article copyright: © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Performance and Operation of the CMS Electromagnetic Calorimeter

The operation and general performance of the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter using cosmic-ray muons are described. These muons were recorded after the closure of the CMS detector in late 2008. The calorimeter is made of lead tungstate crystals and the overall status of the 75848 channels corresponding to the barrel and endcap detectors is reported. The stability of crucial operational parameters, such as high voltage, temperature and electronic noise, is summarised and the performance of the light monitoring system is presented

Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants

Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding preferences – such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism – as likely candidates for fostering large-scale cooperation. A critical question concerns the ontogenetic origins of these constituents of cooperative behavior, as well as whether they emerge independently or in an interrelated fashion. The answer to this question will shed light on the interdisciplinary debate regarding the significance of such preferences for explaining how humans become such cooperative beings. We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion. These findings support arguments for an evolutionary basis – most likely in dialectical manner including both biological and cultural mechanisms – of human egalitarianism given the rapidly developing nature of other-regarding preferences and their role in the evolution of human-specific forms of cooperation. Future work of this kind will help determine to what extent uniquely human sociality and morality depend on other-regarding preferences emerging early in life